In a lovely evisceration of Ross Douthat’s attempt to defend hetero-only marriage by claiming that men’s “natural” inclination is towards promiscuity and women’s towards hooking up with “high-status” males with the result that polygamy is most “natural”, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon points out that
Polygamy is a logical outcome of assuming one gender is human and the other is functionally livestock to be collected and sold by the human gender. Women didn’t invent polygamy in order to make life easier for men and their pockets fatter. But it is amusing to realize that Douthat thinks that those Mormon polygamists marry off 12-year-old girls to 70-year-old men because this reflects a 12-year-old girl’s innate, biological (Darwinian!) desire to get it on with a wrinkly old misogynist.
Great Boxes of Uncooked Macaroni! First of all, when conservative Catholics are reduced to citing evolutionary psychology to defend their homophobia they’ve pretty much already lost. (Consider, for instance Anthony McCarthy’s point that even PSI (telepathy, mindreading, UFOs, etc.) is subject to greater methodological rigor than evolutionary psychology! And take it from there!)
But if you’re going to go waddling around claiming there are gene-maximizing strategies for men and women it would be even more logical for women making free choices to have as many children as possible by as many “high status” male partners as possible so that they’d all contribute both socially and materially to her and her offspring’s well beings. (Skeptical? Me too. But see also EP arguments that women are slow to have orgasms because you “evolved” to need multiple consecutive partners to get off. Yeah, really. The math could be plausible, the etiology not so much. But I digress…)
Problem being that, Douthat’s contentions notwithstanding, that functional-livestock thing Amanda mentions means women typically have not been free to make optimal reproductive choices. Unless, I guess, you’re a woman who agrees with Maggie Gallagher and Douthat that obligatory 24/7 D/s relationships are such a great choice that everybody should be forced into one.
Methodological rigor
Submitted by colorlessblue (not verified) on Tue, 2010-08-10 16:55.Methodological rigor notwithstanding, conservative catholics are not supposed to be anti-Evolution. Unless you’re like my godmother who’s more worried about the hype than what the religion she says she follows actually says, and enjoys getting worked up by propaganda, so you’ll do stuff like falling for anti-Evolution campaigns and believing that Left Behind is based on a literal reading of the Bible.
But tbh I’ve read Douthat’s article (?) a few times and couldn’t make sense of any complete sentence, so I don’t know what he’s trying to say, other than “the gays, they’re icky”.
[I’d have thought they’d draw
Submitted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-08-10 19:29.[I’d have thought they’d draw the line at the evolution of moral behavior though. Unless, I guess, they’re arguing that evolved promiscuity (for both sexes in my scenario, men only in Douthat’s, etc.) is the basis for original sin. Which, again, would make problematic either the story of the Fall or, especially, of the Church’s peculiar antagonism towards Eve.
Good point, though, CB. Thanks!
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Pssh. If anything, humans
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Tue, 2010-08-10 21:41.Pssh. If anything, humans evolved so that some of them are monogamous, and some of them are polyamorous, simply because a variety of tactics for reproduction spread across a population works better than any one thing. And by polyamorous I mean “each person has as many sex partners as they prefer up to as many as they can manage to simultaneously keep a good relationship with”. The whole “one man and as many women as he can financially support, which are treated as livestock” is properly referred to as “polygyny”. Polygyny is a cultural situation which tends to arise when half the men own 99% of the wealth and property and need to be absolutely certain that only their own biological offspring inherit it. And the men tend to marry older because in order to get enough wealth and property to support a family, they either have to wait for their fathers to die or spend decades working their asses off.
Wow. I’m almost totally
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Wed, 2010-08-11 16:09.Wow. I’m almost totally redundant, as this is pretty much everything I hit the ‘comments’ link in order to say. (Thank you for being someone else who is pedantic about ‘polygyny’, I get lonely sometimes.)
I would add to it that I have heard that there does exist a tribe in the Amazon that conducts at least some of its sexuality by the “even more rational” standard that Figleaf proposed. Its spiritual beliefs are that babies are accreted from sperm, and that a single man’s sperm produces a weaker baby than a composite baby. Of course, the obvious “reason” for this belief is that when many men might be the father of the baby, they supply the mother with little gifts, upping her health and prosperity and the baby’s health as a result ….
I hate, hate, HATE it when
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Wed, 2010-08-11 07:04.I hate, hate, HATE it when people say ‘women are attracted to high status men’. Way to make “women like men with confidence and social skills, and who are interesting and good at things” sound creepy and objectifying!
Or even “people like people with confidence and social skills, and who are interesting and good at things”.
I’d also like to introduce Ross Douthat to the existence of Michael Cera, who has built his entire career around (a) being a low-social-status dork and (b) being attractive to women, many of whom want to give him a hug and bake him cookies. Also Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lee Pace and, okay, pretty much the entire genre of ‘quirky indie romance film.’
Jeez. That didn’t even take thirty seconds to disprove. Try harder, Douthat! I want a stupid overgeneralization about women’s desires that’s a challenge to debunk!
I would submit that Cera’s
Submitted by Eurosabra (not verified) on Fri, 2010-08-13 08:36.I would submit that Cera’s heartthrob status is a reflection of his successful film career, and that the many, many men who live like the “Scott Pilgrim” character have the social draw they do (finally scoring a love-of-one’s-life slacker girlfriend) because of status like being front men in bands. I think Douthat is looking at one form of conventional nerd status, and hipster-status-winners like Cera are embodying traditional star power, while men like “Scott Pilgrim” are alternate status winners. PUAs are trying to leverage the feel-good aspects of demonstrating status within the club, while rape-advocacy MRAs like Eivind “Arpagus” Berge argue that most low-status men (who have learned helplessness and introversion from harassment and rejection) will never be able to do that and pillage of neighboring societies is no longer an option.
I think you’re getting the
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Fri, 2010-08-13 20:08.I think you’re getting the cart and the horse a little out of order here? Because the reason Cera has a film career sure as hell isn’t his acting ability, considering that in every movie he ends up playing minor variations on Michael Cera. The reason he has a career is that— even before he was famous— he was really good at being attractive to (a certain kind of) woman. He plays a low-status dorky hipster ‘beta’ dude, and the fantasy is that only you notice his true self and therefore he is totally sweet and nice and treats you like a queen.
Besides, if it was just fame that was the attractive bit, there would be equal female fanbases for Cera and, say, Jack Black, which is not the case at all. And Lee Pace, totally obscure actor in a quickly cancelled TV show, wouldn’t have even the tiny number of fans he has gushing over his smile and his awkwardness and his absolutely adorable gestures of love and whyyyy did Pushing Daisies not last more than one season.
I haven’t seen Scott Pilgrim (yet), so I can’t comment on that.
Occam’s razor: PUA strategies work because they tend to make people funnier, more confident and more interesting, all traits that are highly correlated with people, including women, tending to like you. And anyone who can be fairly described as a rape apologist is probably very very creepy, therefore ending their success with women. See? Status not necessary as an explanation.
You’re getting it all wrong,
Submitted by colorlessblue (not verified) on Sat, 2010-08-14 03:49.You’re getting it all wrong, trying to go into it with logic and thinking women actually have feelings and stuff. I’ll explain: if a dude falls into the standards of physical attractiveness and is successful, and women are attracted to him, it proves that women are shallow moneygrabbing whores. If the dude has the looks but not the success, and women still like him, it proves that women are shallow but too dumb to be competent moneygrabbing whores. If the dude has success but not the looks, and women like him, they’re moneygrabbing whores interested in only his fortune and his cars. And if he have no looks and no money, and women like him, it proves that they’re dumb. Now, if you’re a dude and women just don’t like you, it proves that you’re a Nice Guy.
“Way to make “women like men
Submitted by Tiktaalik (not verified) on Fri, 2010-08-13 17:50.“Way to make “women like men with confidence and social skills, and who are interesting and good at things” sound creepy and objectifying!”
Because it is.
I’m… not sure what you mean
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Fri, 2010-08-13 20:16.I’m… not sure what you mean by that statement. Do you mean that it’s creepy and objectifying because it implies that men ought to do these things, and if they do the universe ought to issue them a girlfriend? Because that would be creepy, but also not what I meant. It was an overgeneralization, meant to suggest that overall, on average, everything else being equal, a person who is confident, has good social skills and is interesting and good at things will tend to be more romantically successful than a person who is not. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear.
Or is it something else that I was too stupid to get? If so, would you mind explaining?
“If women don’t find you
Submitted by Eurosabra (not verified) on Tue, 2010-08-17 20:46.“If women don’t find you handsome, at least they can find you handy.”—Red Green. As I keep telling the denizens of The Pervocracy blog, I couldn’t find any common cultural, physical, or behavioral characteristic among the women who desired my average-looking, super-intelligent, less-than-able-bodied and poor self other than the fact that apparently no one else besides me desired them, which explained the existence, strength, and tenacity of their desire.
As an occasional denizen of
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Wed, 2010-08-18 05:07.As an occasional denizen of the Pervocracy, I have to point out that women do honestly desire not-so-conventionally-attractive people sometimes (I’m sorry to keep using celebrities, but they’re something everyone can double-check on to see if my argument works— consider Zooey Deschanel, who’s extremely pretty, and Ben Gibbard, her husband, who is an incredible singer and fairly intelligent and presumably a nice person, but also resembles a portly accountant).
And why should there necessarily be a common characteristic among People Who Are Interested In Eurosabra? What does that have to do with my argument at all? All I was saying is that women have preferences, and that Michael Cera is extremely attractive while low-status, and the dating advice your mom gave you when you were twelve actually holds up.
Michael Cera is not
Submitted by Eurosabra (not verified) on Thu, 2010-08-19 16:42.Michael Cera is not low-status, and never has been, he was a known voice actor in Canada from childhood and I maintain his dating life has only been improved by his fame, although it’s hard to say because of his discretion, he seems to be trading up from his pre-fame link with Charlyne Yi, whom I find adorable, but, hey, “Superbad” can indeed give you entrée into the film’s “world in which girls like boners”, provided you STAR IN IT. So I think male celebrities are a non-starter as a counter-argument. Lyle Lovett/Julia Roberts?
A common characteristic would have reinforced the idea of either my or their having a “type”, whereas what I was doing was transactionally“selling” male sexuality (or at least mine)/male sexual attention AS SUCH to women who apparently had even less opportunity for sexual activity than I did, due mainly to autism, social awkwardness, still living with our parents as adults, disability issues, etc. I was ending 3-year, 5-year, 10-year dry spells, taking care of 32-year-old virgins, etc. And, um, I really valued them as people and as partners except for the radical devaluation of our bodies and sexualities by society and the problematics of tutorial sex with someone really/totally inexperienced. I suppose had I not met actual relationship expectations my behavior would have been characterized as totally predatory. My earlier relationships in grad school were less problematic and, unsurprisingly, involved more conventionally-attractive women who were leading more conventional lives, and I thought PUA would let me get back to that, instead it made me cranky and predatory, leading to a period of “deprogramming.”
So, um, Too Much Information a long time ago.